Skip to main content

Configuration Overview

Snowbridge is configured using HCL. To configure Snowbridge, create your configuration in a file with .hcl extension, and set the SNOWBRIDGE_CONFIG_FILE environment variable to the path to your file. By default, the Snowbridge docker image uses /tmp/config.hcl as the config path - when using the docker images you can either mount your config file to /tmp/config.hcl, or mount it to a different path, and set the SNOWBRIDGE_CONFIG_FILE environment variable in your docker container to that path.

Inside the configuration, you can reference environment variables using the env object. For example, to refer to an environment variable named MY_ENV_VAR in your configuration, you can use env.MY_ENV_VAR. We recommend employing environment variables for any sensitive value, such as a password, as opposed to adding the value to the configuration verbatim.

For most options, Snowbridge uses blocks for configuration. The use keyword specifies what you'd like to configure - for example a kinesis source is configured using source { use "kinesis" {...}}.

For all configuration blocks except for transformations, you must provide only one block (or none, to use the defaults).

For transformations, you may provide 0 or more transform configuration blocks. They will be applied to the data, one after another, in the order they appear in the configuration. The exception to this is when a filter is applied and the filter condition is met - in this case the message will be acked and subsequent transformations will not be applied (neither will the data be sent to the destination).

Some application-level options are not contained in a block, instead they're top-level options in the configuration. For example, to set the log level of the application, we just set the top-level variable log_level.

If you do not provide a configuration, or provide an empty one, the application will use the defaults:

  • stdin source;
  • no transformations;
  • stdout target;
  • stdout failure target. There’ll be no external statistics reporting or sentry error reporting.

License​

Since version 2.4.0, Snowbridge is released under the Snowplow Limited Use License (FAQ).

To accept the terms of license and run Snowbridge, set the ACCEPT_LIMITED_USE_LICENSE=yes environment variable. Alternatively, you can configure the license.accept option, like this:

license {
  accept = true
}

Example configuration​

The below example is a complete configuration, which specifies a kinesis source, a builtin Snowplow filter (which may only be used if the input is Snowplow enriched data), a custom javascript transformation, and a pubsub target, as well as the statsD stats receiver, and sentry for error reporting.

In layman's terms, this configuration will read data from a kinesis stream, filter out any data whose event_name field is not page_view, run a custom Javascript script upon the data to change the app_id to "1", and send the transformed page view data to pubsub. It will also send statistics about what it's doing to a statsD endpoint, and will send information about errors to a sentry endpoint.

assets/docs/configuration/overview-full-example.hcl
loading...